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ORAL HISTORY OF HORACE V. WELLS, JR.
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 10, 1973
Interviewer: Maybe if you would first identify yourself and….
Mr. Wells: I was looking over the list of questions that you wanted there and of course my name is Horace V. Wells, Jr. I still use that because my father is still living and his name is Horace V. Wells also. He is 96 years old, will be this year. Anyhow I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. My family moved to Nashville in 1919 when I was small, and then I went to the schools in Nashville and I eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University. While I was in Vanderbilt I started work for the Tennessean. And I worked for the Tennessean for 5 years, and when I left I was State News Editor of the Tennessean. My wife and I decided we would like to live in a small town and have our own newspaper so we heard of an opportunity here in Clinton. This was at that time that TVA was being authorized and had been authorized by Congress and President Roosevelt had signed the bill. So we came to Clinton and there was a newspaper here, Anderson County News. The newspaper was a handset newspaper, even in 1933 and with the cooperation of a man named Miner Bragg in Murfreesboro who owned the Rutherford Courier, we gathered enough machinery and other necessary materials together and came to Clinton in August of 1933. On August 31st we published our first paper, Clinton Courier. Then a few years later in 1939, why Anderson County News was for sale and I bought it and combined the two newspapers into the Clinton Courier News. It was during that period Norris Dam was built and the town of Norris and the county had shown, the county did not really suffer during that depression period cause everybody was short of money, the whole country, but the banks here did not fail. They did combine but they did not fail. Magnet Mills continued to work at least part time and provided work for the people, that was the large industry here in the county. So things went along pretty well and we were able to make a go of it and then of course in 1942 Oak Ridge came in. That changed the whole complex of the county and our operation and everything else.
I noticed you were interested in my family. My wife died in 1969. She and I graduated together from Vanderbilt and worked on the paper together. We have four daughters. The oldest is Dorothy Ann, who lives in Indianapolis and she is a librarian. She has a Masters in Library Science from Indiana University. She worked at Oak Ridge for a while before with ORAU before she went up there, to Indianapolis. She has three children. And then we have twins, Natalie and Katrina. Natalie lives in Nashville and Katrina lives in Lake City, Florida. Each of them has three children. Then my youngest daughter, Nancy, lives in Elmira, New York and she has one and one on the way. 10 grandchildren and one in prospect. All of them, I’m happy to say, completed their college work before they got married and each of them has training in some specific field. So whatever comes, why, at least I have that assurance that they can take care of themselves. That’s about all you can give them you know.
We came to Clinton in ’33 and of course, at that time there weren’t any houses available just like now, still not any houses available. After I had gone back to Nashville, one of the men I had contacted called me and said his brother was moving to Lake City and his house would be available and so we rented the house sight unseen and then came to Clinton and moved into it. I don’t think my wife ever saw if before we moved into it. We stayed there three years in this house and meanwhile built our own house where we live now. We still live there. The years in Clinton have really sped by. This year we celebrate our 40th anniversary in Clinton. We’ve seen Clinton change a great deal in those years. The population in Clinton when we came was around 1700 and of course today it’s just, in the narrow city limits that we have, it’s around 5,000. When you get outside of Clinton of course you know, depending how far out you go it begins to multiply whether you’d say that the Clinton area has probably 10 or 12 thousand people, not counting Oak Ridge.
The paper has, we started out, interesting to look back, and our first goal was to get 500 subscribers. We offered to take anything for that first 500. We swapped for jams and jellies and eggs and potatoes and most anything that people would bring in. My wife of course, was a Math major at Vanderbilt and had worked in New York for Macy’s as a statistician. She was not trained as a cook. One day I traded in a bushel of grapes. So I took them home and she said what am I going to do with these grapes? And I said well, make jelly, make jelly and she said well that’s a good idea. So I went home that night and she was in tears. She was just bawling. And I said what is the trouble? She said, I’ve been warming these grapes all day. I said what have you been doing? She said, I’ve been peeling the grapes. I said, peeling the grapes? I said well, what is it, why peel the grapes? She said, well here’s the recipe. And I looked at it and the recipe said for fruit jellies first peel the fruit. Of course she learned the hard way. I never did let her forget that.
The circulation began to grow when the first 500 came really rather rapidly. The people seemed real anxious for a newspaper. And over the years it’s grown. We have been thrilled by each of the steps as it’s reached a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand and now we’re right close to seven thousand now. And ours is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and so we are looking forward to the day when we really will have that seven thousand. We get up there and then we drop back. Soon I think that it will hold. We are not making any particular effort because of the newsprint shortage and the fact that you can only charge so much for advertising. It’s just a matter of pride; we’d like to see it get to seven thousand. You know we make the effort to gather the news and put it together and have a product there. The more people that want to buy it, the prouder you can be of your product. So that’s the only reason we’d like to have that.
The county’s gone through several interesting periods. The coming of Norris created problems. TVA brought in people and during that period skilled people were out of jobs all over the country, engineers, architects and so TVA brought in people from everywhere. They came in from Middle West and from the East and these were all, many of them, were well educated people, just due to the depression, were unable to find satisfactory jobs. So they came in and of course in the early days all the people that lived in Norris worked for TVA and for many years, had the Bureau Mines in Norris. Of course these are all technical people. They had laboratories there for a while in which they explored the making of crystals and then the ceramics and each of these brought in people with certain skills. And then of course TVA began to get out of that area and out of the, the laboratory in Norris then was changed to one that would provide TVA with information about its various projects, the dams and the steam plants and the effect of these on the river traffic and the channels and so forth. And so at the laboratory in Norris now, they, most of the people there are skilled and they studied water flows and the pressures of water. When they developed then, built Melton Hill, they developed a new method of emptying the locks and refilling the locks much more rapidly without, with less, turbulence than had been the case on many others. But anyhow, over the years Norris has ceased to become just a TVA town. And people from the county live there, moved in there and also a great many of the people I think, probably near 50%, nearly 50% of the people work in Oak Ridge and drive from Norris to Oak Ridge. It’s a beautiful neighborhood community, bedroom community, and many of them drive to Knoxville, now that they have the interstate why they can be in Knoxville in 20-25 minutes, which is closer than some areas right in Knoxville as far as time is concerned.
Back in the early days, Anderson County was a pretty strong Republican county and of course the people that came into Norris were liberals and, back in those days the only place a liberal had to go was to the Democratic Party so the Republicans didn’t want them to vote. And so they contended they lived on a government reservation therefore they weren’t entitled to vote. And so a bunch of us got together here in Clinton and took the case to the Supreme Court. Just in a matter of days, Judge Barnett ruled that the people were entitled to vote. So that opened the door for Norris and Norris has continued to vote pretty strongly Democratic all down through the years. Then when Oak Ridge came in we had the same problem. They had a little problem voting back in the early days but they soon worked it. There was a difference in Oak Ridge and Norris though. The people in the early days in Oak Ridge lived in apartments. They were temporary residents and the question was were they really, was Oak Ridge really their home, because in many instances people say, well, they were just there for their work and this was not their home. This was during the construction days before people had settled down. And probably the matter of real fact, Oak Ridge was not their home. And of course under the election laws, you’re supposed to vote at your home, where your home is, even though you may be living somewhere else, you’re supposed to still go home. This has caused a little problem but finally they, it has worked out and settled down.
Oak Ridge had a great influence on the county and the influence has been largely for the good. As a result Anderson County has many firsts in its government. It’s one of the first counties in Tennessee to adopt the central purchasing and central accounting system. It’s one of the few counties in Tennessee that has outside auditors, not state auditors, but auditors hired by the county to come in and check the books. It was the first county in Tennessee to take advantage of a new state law in establishing a conservation commission. It was one of the first counties, not the first county, but one of the first, to have its sanitary landfill approved. One of the first counties to establish a roadside pickup of garbage to eliminate these roadside dumps. One of the first counties to get involved as a county in the operation of an ambulance service. One of the first counties to begin to change over to the use of computers for the handling of its tax rolls. (tape break) The registers office also, the Register of Deeds Office, also has some of the most modern equipment of any similar office in this state and eventually will probably go to placing the records on microfilm, they’re not on microfilm yet, but looking toward the day when it can go to microfilm. These are just some examples of the influence of the forward and progressive people who serve on county court from Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge does not have control of the county court because the numbers of squires in the county exceeds the number of squires in Oak Ridge by one, but many of the squires in Oak Ridge work in Oak Ridge so you have that Oak Ridge influence. As I say, it’s been a good influence. Anderson County has some real good efficient office workers because of the fact that Oak Ridge votes for quality and candidates, not necessarily party. We have a mixture: the county Judge is Republican, the sheriff is a Democrat, the county attorney is a Democrat and the Trustee is a Republican. Your county court clerk and your circuit court clerk, school superintendent and --????-- are all democrats. So you see that not party line necessarily, although each party does try to field a ticket and put in candidates, but the voters when it comes down to the voters, they usually select, they have selected men of quality. So the influence of Oak Ridge has been real good.
Now you asked something about the take over, the taking over or the acquiring of the land in Oak Ridge. This was a rather difficult period for the county. The U.S. Army sent in people who were in government service to handle the acquisition of the property for the then called Clinton Engineering Works, Clinton Demolition Range, they called it at one time. They had different names for it then. It’s kind of a misleading type of name too, so people would have no idea what it was. They sent in people here, many of the men came from the Midwest where farmland, rich, rolling land, they came in here and saw these hills in East Tennessee and they said it’s not worth anything. Well here were people who had land that had been in their family from the original grant, from the state of North Carolina, for service in the Revolutionary War. The land had never been sold and it was the only home they had. They been making a living there, they were satisfied. They came in and offered prices that they felt were too low. And in fact they were too low for them to go and buy comparable land anywhere else. Some of the people that were moved, this was the third time they were moved by the government. They originally lived in the area that is now the Smoky Mountain National Park. The government bought, or the state or the government didn’t buy it, but the state bought the land and they were moved out and they moved into the Norris Dam, Anderson, Union, Campbell County area where Norris Lake is located. Then the TVA came along and bought the land and they, TVA, did pay fair prices for the land and they moved out and said, we’ll just find us a place where nobody can find us. So they moved down here in the lower end of the Clinch River, down where K-25 and X-10 are located, there’s nobody can find us down here, but then they did. Because the very fact that they were living in an area that was more or less remote and protected by hills and on the river, was one of the reasons they selected this site, so they had to move again. At the time that they were having to move, gasoline rationing, tire rationing went into effect, and it was difficult for them to get gasoline, difficult for them to get tires. I was chairman of the Ration Board at that time and so it was part of my job, along with the others on the Board, to do something about it. So, we got in touch with the people in Nashville and they got in touch with people in Washington, and said we never heard of Clinton Engineering Works. We never heard of it. We never heard of the Manhattan District, don’t know anything about it, we have no provisions for it at all. So we had to come back and so we told them, well these people up there, their lands taken away from them, they’ve got to move in limited time and we’ve got to have tires and gasoline. And I said, now we’re going to see that they’re moved. They said, alright you go ahead and make up your own rule, just so you treat everybody alike, and just don’t tell us about it. I said we’ll try to take care of it. You let us know about the tires and of course most of them are recapped tires, this was during the period before the country had developed a synthetic rubber and this was in that early period. Tires were real scarce. So we came back and they did, whenever they had any excess tires left from any other county in the state, they would give them to us. General Lytle Brown was in charge of the War Price and Ration Board at that time in Nashville for the state. I visited his home in Nashville when I was in school and I knew his sons. He understood our problem and he cooperated with us and we got everybody moved out. We got them gasoline to go out and look for another place, and we got them tires and so that finally when they did find a place they could move out. Well of course the record will show, if you look into that, that many of these people went into Federal Court. Congress sent a committee down to investigate it. They did receive considerably more for their land on appeal, than may have been offered by the government. This was a real upsetting situation for awhile there. And as much more upsetting due to the fact that they didn’t know what was going to happen. All the rumors about what they were going to do down there and none of it was in connection with the war efforts, you know. Some kind of boondoggle thing you know. They didn’t feel that they were making a contribution to the war effort because they didn’t know what it was. This made it more difficult to come in and take their homes. In one instance of a black family, an elderly lady lived there, she had a very small home, she had a good well. The house was of no real value and they didn’t offer her anything particularly for it. Well where could she go and find a piece of land with a spring and have a house on it? This was the problem they faced. When you are trying to put dollar and cent value on it, against what it was worth to her. It was our feeling that people that are uprooted in this fashion, should be relocated in a similar situation somewhere, no matter what it cost. And we felt that you could not put it on a dollar and cents basis. There’d be a comparability basis. But this was a real problem and a real hardship for a lot of people.
Interviewer: I would think particularly the people who had been moved more than once.
Mr. Wells continues: Well, she had never been moved, this was not true in her case, but it was in many of the others. But anyhow that was the period through there.
Interviewer: I’d like to know what some of the rumors were, you mentioned the rumors as to what was being done here.
Mr. Wells continues: Most of them were rumors of you know, they didn’t have any idea what. They thought it was some political thing that Roosevelt was behind. They talked about, well they didn’t have any idea. Nobody had any idea what was being done. Most of the rumors were pretty absurd type of things because they didn’t have any idea. Of course when you’re talking about demolition range we knew what that was and that was what they were afraid of, you know for awhile that this was to be some kind of target practicing range down there. The first location, was there was a demolition located the headquarters located in Kingston. Well they never did kind of get over that, until later they did change the name to Clinton Engineer Works and then dropped that demolition name. You can imagine what the situation was when they thought about that. But people really didn’t have any idea; it was a well-kept secret as far as the local people concerned. It might not be well kept as far as the Russians were concerned or the Germans, but locally it was a well-kept secret. Of course we saw, here in Clinton, the Southern Railroad had a depot here, it was the nearest depot to Oak Ridge until they finally worked out an arrangement where the L&N and Southern, both went into Oak Ridge over the same track. They began to unload these huge vacuum tubes that was six feet tall, you know, and things like that. Of course people here had no idea what they could be used for, but these were fantastic type of things. They’d never seen a tube larger than one used in the radio you know. See these big tubes that are six feet high being unloaded up there.
Interviewer: That cause quite a bit of consternation I’d think.
Mr. Wells continues: It cause a great deal of concern. The yard would just be full of them up there, until they could come and haul them off. We had a tremendous influx of people during the early days. It was estimated that we probably had more than 80,000 people in the area at one time. The people were living in barns and chicken houses. Of course automobile business firms went out of business, so the garages, some of the garages, were converted into kind of dormitory arrangements. They were really not much more than dove coops, like places for doves, you know, little cubicles all through there and people just placed anywhere, and the men were just here four or five days a week and then they’d go home on the weekend you know, except when they’d work overtime. It created a lot of other problems, it’s interesting to look back and see some of the problems that resulted from it. A lot of the men were away from their families, so the first thing you know you, the court was deluged with divorce cases. Every court the docket was filled, back then we only had the circuit court and chancery court and the criminal court. Well the criminal court didn’t handle divorces, circuit court only met once every four months, and the chancery court only met once every six months. Well you can see what happened. The dockets in circuit and chancery court were just literally loaded down with divorce cases. So that’s when they created the trial justice court and gave it concurrent jurisdiction in divorce and domestic matters with the chancery court and then they were able to get over the, bring down the backlog of divorce cases. But that’s how we got the, we were one of the first counties in the state to have that type of court, which later became the sessions court. This was the, it was called the trial justice court because of the fact it was given concurrent jurisdiction in divorce cases and domestic matters. And that was the result of the heavy influx into the county.
Of course Oak Ridge had a big influence on the elections in the early days. One of the big fights that we had around here was over legalization of the sale of alcoholic beverages, liquor. We’d already been through a number of them in the county before Oak Ridge came and they’d always been overwhelmingly defeated. Back then it was just beer. And so when Oak Ridge came, why some of the people that saw an opportunity to make money, they were the ones that requested and the ones that were putting up the money to fight the battle. So they came in and they stole the election, stuffed the ballot boxes and carried it for legalization of alcoholic beverages, the sale of whiskey. Of course Oak Ridge...
Interviewer: What year was this?
Mr. Wells continues: I don’t remember the year.
Interviewer: This was before Oak RIdge?
Mr. Wells continues: No this was in Oak Ridge, it was during the high day of Oak Ridge, before Oak Ridge was incorporated and Oak Ridge couldn’t have a whiskey store because it wasn’t incorporated. So the whiskey stores were in Clinton and Lake City and ...
Interviewer: Which was not what the people wanted.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s what we didn’t want. We didn’t want. But anyhow, they operated for, I think, a couple of years. Meanwhile the election fraud was so bad, that even the early League of Women Voters in Oak Ridge and the people in the county said, we just can’t have this type of election so they went and got voting machines. We were one of the first rural counties in Tennessee to have voting machines. So the county court voted to buy voting machines and Judge Yarnell went out to San Francisco, I mean Los Angeles, and bought some second hand voting machines. They had gotten beyond the capacity of the voting machines they were using. So he bought these voting machines and brought them back here, brought a truckload of voting machines back. So we switched to voting machines and we’ve been on voting machines ever since. So the next election with the voting machines, they voted liquor out. Which goes to prove that it actually was a fraud.
Interviewer: It was fraud.
Mr. Wells continues: In fact there are many other evidences of the fraud and that is, the pull books from the remote precincts were just filled with name of people that, like the publisher of the Oak Ridger and some of these other names, they just wrote in names over there. It was just an out and out steal. The interesting thing, the county judge took the case, we fought the thing all the way through it, we took it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court threw it out on the grounds that the county judge was not the proper person to bring the suit into court and he was charged with the costs, personally. To me that was one of the side lights of the early conflicts. Before the trial justice court, one of the things that brought it about was the Justice of the Peace courts that we had operating. Oak Ridge had two Justices of the Peace down there. You can imagine with all the problems that came with floating population and with the people living here temporarily and making so much money, they didn’t know what to do with it, that you had a lot of problems: gambling, whiskey and fights and shooting and just everything you can think of. So the courts, the Justice of the Peace courts were really flourishing. They were the ones that issued the warrants and had the preliminary hearings and collected the fees. So the thing got so bad in Oak Ridge that it just got completely out of hand and one of the Justices of the Peace down there was convicted and sent to jail for fraud. Absconding with the thieves and he was not keeping his record and so forth so he was sent to jail. And that also helped bring about, the people, it’s interesting that people won’t agree to a change in the way things are done, until something gets so bad that they can’t stand it.
Interviewer: I think that’s true.
Mr. Wells continues: Then they’ll change. That’s what happened in this instance. And that made it easy to get the, to take away all authority from the Justice of the Peace as far as hearing cases and trying cases was concerned. Well, of course, he wasn’t the only one, he’s just the only one that got caught. We had some up here in Clinton that were just as bad, but he was the one that got caught. And so the sheriffs were ousted and some of them just resigned when they, it was a period when, with such an influx of population and with these people being committed to vote, that people got into offices shouldn’t be there. And we had slot machines, we had illegal whiskey, we had gambling all over the place. Whenever you have that, whenever you see signs of slot machines in a county where it’s against the law, you know that somebody has control of your law enforcement agency. It couldn’t exist otherwise. When they control them in one area, they control them in all. They can’t just control them a little bit; they control them all the way. This is what happened back then. It was a pretty lawless period there for a while.
Interviewer: It must have been rather parallel to an army camp for a while.
Mr. Wells continues: It was similar to that, that’s right.
Interviewer: Cause they were not families who came in.
Mr. Wells continues: We had the same thing earlier when Norris Dam was being built. We had all these people in here working on Norris Dam, and we had a sheriff that divided his force up into, had one man that handled the whiskey, one man handled the gambling, one man handled the girls and he turned it over to them. They had all these roadhouses scattered all through the county and it was a wild and wooly period. The last time he ran, he ran, he was re-elected; you know the sheriff can only serve three consecutive terms. The last time he ran, this time for Uncle Bob, Bob Smith, this time for Uncle Bob, and he was elected.
Interviewer: Well did the situation then begin to change when Oak Ridge became more stabilized?
Mr. Wells continues: Oh yes. That’s right. As soon as the families, as soon as you have the influence of your families and people began to pay taxes you know…bring, having their families here and getting to pay taxes has a real sobering effect on the community.
Interviewer: Of course Oak Ridge didn’t pay taxes until after….
Mr. Wells continues: No that’s right, but they had their families here. I think that is the biggest sobering influence that we had. We just had all these dormitories filled with men and others filled with women that were guests here, really, they would say, if I die send me back home, send me home; which would indicate very clearly this was not home.
Interviewer: That must present a very unstable situation.
Mr. Wells continues: So this was the situation. Well now on the, you asked one question there about acquisition of the land. The difference in the acquisition by TVA and by the, I think it was the treasury people that came in and acquired it for the Army, the attitude was entirely different. In the first place TVA came in and they used local people. They did everything they could to be sure that the people were paid a fair price for the land. They did everything they could to be sure, and I never did hear any real serious complaint about TVA not paying fair price for the land. And in the second they used local people who understood the value of the land and the people. And the third thing they did, they saw that the people were relocated; they helped the people relocate. They brought in all the various government agencies to help relocate. When they took over Oak Ridge then they did not do much about relocating. It was a hurry up job that pushed into it and it was not as well organized, now they did provide some help, the University did try to help. I remember the Sunday before the area was to be closed off, a group from the University came out, came by my house one Sunday afternoon and said come on let’s go down and ride through the Oak Ridge area. Last time we’ll have a chance. I said that’s fine, I’d like to do that. So we went down and rode all through there and they told me then, that they had been asked to help in doing some of the relocating. But it was such a rush job that it couldn’t be done properly. But in Norris it was not that rushed. You see they started building the dam in ’33 and the dam was not completed until ’36, so they had three years for the people really to get out, except in certain specific spots where the actual dam construction was. Nobody lived there anyhow, right there, they lived near there but not there. Some of the areas where the timber had to be cut out where it would interfere. Now you take right near Norris Dam the water there is several hundred feet deep. Well they just cut off, they didn’t have to cut any of that out, right in there except where they’re working, but as you got further back, some of them they just cut off the tops of the trees and other places they had to clean it all out. It just depended on, well above a certain level, above a certain amount of sea level they had to clean it out.
Interviewer: And there was no acute urgency as there was in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Wells continues: The urgency was not there. It was being handled more or less on a local basis, by local people.
Interviewer: That would make a great difference in the attitude.
Mr. Wells continues: It did make a great difference and it made a difference in attitude. The people who were acquiring the land, it made a difference in the attitude who were being uprooted. They’d go in and sit down with them and tell them what was happening. Another thing that was interesting in that period was that of course, that was a period when nobody had any money. You could go out and buy land somewhere else. There had not been this tremendous increase in the value of land that came along later. Of course now its even worse, but in the 1940-‘42 in that period the price of land had gone up. TVA had built several dams. They’d built Douglas Dam and some of these others and moved people out of all these valleys. Well you were narrowing down the available land that people could go and buy. So the price had gone up. There were a lot of factors combined to make it a real difficult period for some of the people that moved out and some of them are real bitter.
Interviewer: Do you think that resentment still persist today among some people?
Mr. Wells continues: I don’t know whether it does or not, but that’s too far back now, most of the older people are dead and gone. The young ones have gotten settled and doing other things.
You were discussing the school situation. As far as Anderson County was concerned back then, they had two schools down there. They had Robertsville, which for a while operated as a high school and then they had Scarboro which was a brand new school, it had just been opened. And Scarboro now is run by the University and the Atomic Energy Commission have a joint operation there studying animals and so forth and the effect of...
Interviewer: You’re referring to the UT Ag Farm?
Mr. Wells continues: Yeah. That was Scarboro School. It was fairly new so they bought the school, bought both of them from the county.
Interviewer: Now where was Robertsville?
Mr. Wells continues: It’s where it is now, where the old Robertsville School is now. They left it and began to add on to and spread out there and...
Interviewer: Well now there is a school which is now called Robertsville Junior High School which was built about 1953, I believe maybe the old Robertsville was on that site before.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s right. Right there, that’s the same place. Then there was another school down in Roane County, I’ve been trying to think of the name of, and for some reason it just completely escapes my memory, down where K-25 is.
Interviewer: There was a community called Wheat in that area.
Mr. Wells continues: Wheat that’s right, now that’s in Roane county and...
Interviewer: ...and there was a school at Wheat.
Mr. Wells continues: There was a school at Wheat. There was kind of an academy there back years. You see, in this area and I guess outside of the cities, until oh the early 1900’s there were no high schools provided by the state or the county.
Interviewer: I didn’t know that.
Mr. Wells continues: They had these academies, these private schools. They provided the elementary schools and then they didn’t provide the high schools. Then the high schools came into being in the early 1900’s somewhere in there, but before that they had these academies: Anderson Academy, Coal Creek Academy, Wheat Academy, the old Clinton Academy. People would pay tuition and send their children to these academies. There were only a few of the children, most of them just finished with the elementary grades. However, you look back, and my father did not go beyond that elementary grade level but he studied Latin and Greek.
Interviewer: In the elementary level?
Mr. Wells continues: In the elementary level. And wherever he finished off. He still remembers some of his Greek and some of his Latin even now...
Interviewer: That’s remarkable.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s remarkable. But they were concerned with educating, those that got education were proud of it and they went to school to learn and not just to pass the time. My mother and her father operated and owned one of these academies. His academy, over in North Carolina, was for girls. And of course she went there and her sister went there and spelling and writing were two of the things they pushed for girls, particularly among other social graces. But she takes great pride in, and all her life has taken pride in her ability to spell. Today we’ve gotten into that period where school teachers grew up in the period, when they taught phonetics and didn’t teach spelling, and our school teachers have grown up to the point where they can’t spell and have no pride and they brush it off that they can’t spell and they don’t encourage their pupils to learn to spell. We’ve gotten into the age where people really don’t care that they can’t spell and to me it’s a real distressing thing. I deal with schoolteachers and others and it’s just a shame that, my own daughter some of them are in that same fix, and yet they are all college graduates but they can’t spell.
Interviewer: My husband has commented on this as a scientist.
Mr. Wells continues: It’s distressing but of course that’s aside from our topic.
Interviewer: I would like to know a little more about the schools. Did they continue to use Scarboro School and Robertsville School for the children who came into Oak Ridge?
Mr. Wells continues: Not Scarboro, they did not use Scarboro for a school because there were no dwellings in that area. I think they did use Robertsville for a while but it was inadequate. They had to build other schools. It was a small school, relatively small. It was probably just a small high school. I don’t know how many rooms it had but not more than, I don’t remember how many. I’ve been there, I was down there….I was down there before Oak Ridge came but I don’t remember how many rooms it had.
Interviewer: Did the people who came in throw much of a burden on the county school system or were there that many living outside the area who went to the Clinton system.
Mr. Wells continues: There had been a burden on county schools. The first burden hit us down around Oliver Springs and that’s when Norwood School was built. We did get some federal money to help build Norwood school, and that’s the only help that we had from the federal government except the 874 money.
Interviewer: That’s the impacted area….
Mr. Wells continues: That’s the impacted area money which it goes for operation but not for building.
Interviewer: Well that doesn’t seem quite right.
Mr. Wells continues: No, it didn’t and which we argue with the AEC about now. They had a study made not long ago that they’d several, I think at $80,000 the University of Tennessee made this study and they came up with the same thing. They said it wasn’t right either and the county has had to build all these schools, add on to them to take care of the children of the people who had come in. But the only federal money that I remember was for Norwood Elementary School and for the rest of them we’ve had to go ahead and the county’s had to build them.
Interviewer: Well did this throw much of a burden on the other facilities, things like the stores and the…
Mr. Wells continues: During the war period there was a tremendous burden. We had, of course, things were rationed, sugar was rationed, coffee was rationed, shoes were rationed. And when they started rationing things why of course, the reason they had to ration was because they were in short supply. Bacon was difficult to buy, about the only time you got bacon was if you were a long time customer of the store, they might save it for you. I have seen lines of people standing waiting to buy bread. Bread was short and I’ve seen longer lines of people waiting to buy cigarettes and women’s hose. Miller’s used to get a shipment every now and then of women’s hose and word would get out and I’ve seen the line all the way around that store, way back up the block waiting for the store to open to buy hose. Because you see, when we got in war with Japan, eliminated the silk and then they had to develop the synthetic fibers and there was lag there, between the time they developed, and they had to change over the machines to use the synthetic fibers. The machines had been using silk. So there’s a lag in that period and so there was a tremendous shortage of hosiery. And this gave Magnet Mills a chance to use up all that surplus stock of hose they’d built up back during the Depression days.
Interviewer: It’s and ill wind…
Mr. Wells: They’d continue to operate and they built up a huge surplus of what they called grey stock and then the war came along and there they had it and so they were able to sell it then. They cleaned it out.
Interviewer: It helped them out.
Mr. Wells continues: And they helped the whole community because the people were busy there. Then of course, the people were going to Oak Ridge to work and they were short of labor to finish it and to process it. So it’s interesting how one thing has an impact on the other and helps one and hurts another. But the impact on the stores was not so great except the fact that we had the shortages and more people we had in here, we all lived through it you know, it wasn’t all that bad. Coffee was short, I didn’t drink coffee anyhow so it didn’t matter to me in particular. Sugar was short, we didn’t do a lot of canning, so that didn’t affect us a whole lot. We were able to get by on the shoes without too much difficulty. We did miss the bacon a few times but we got by. It’s interesting that people now have gotten so spoiled that you talk about gasoline rationing, we will probably have by next spring. We had it back then, I know that I had to ride the train to Nashville down there on ration board business. I couldn’t get gasoline to go down there on ration board business. I rode the train down there and...
Interviewer: And that was an overnight trip?
Mr. Wells continues: Yeah, it took me all night to get down there and stayed down there and came back the next night and it was rough. I remember we went to Nashville on the bus going to Press Association meetings. We’d go down there on the bus and it was an all day trip down there just about, the bus stopping all along the way.
Interviewer: It still is, almost.
[SIDE 2]
Mr. Wells continues: But you know you live through those although you wonder, I remember at times we’d think well how much longer, just like a nightmare, how much longer will it continue. How much longer? Of course, as far as business was concerned, our operation, it was real difficult to get help and we were really strained. Of course at the same time it was difficult to get help it was difficult to get paper and course merchant, didn’t have to advertise, what could they advertise, they couldn’t get things to sell. Car advertising was all out and it was a real struggle for awhile there. But we made it, everybody made it. Do you have any other thing that you were particularly interested in?
Interviewer: I’ve got some questions here but I haven’t, I think we’ve covered most of what I’ve mentioned in the letter.
Mr. Wells continues: I want to say, an aside, that in the 40 years, when I came to Anderson County 40 years ago the type for the newspaper was set by hand, I brought the first live type and then later on bought a teletype operator, tape operation, that and a new line of type that could operate with this tape which meant that I, we would perforate the tape from the keyboard and then the tape would operate the machine which speeded up the operation a great deal and then the first of this year we did away with the lining all together and now we’re using these computer type operation to set the type. So we’ve gone all the way from hand set to the computer period in those 40 years. And for the line type we speeded it up where we could set 8 to 10 lines a minute. The computer type operations, and it’s not the fastest one available, will set 30 lines a minute.
Interviewer: That’s quite a …
Mr. Wells continues: Of course you can get one that’s set 150 to 200 lines a minute but we don’t need that much production. So we’re satisfied with the 30 lines and this operation we go from the keyboard to the finished product. We don’t have any intermediate steps, keyboard to the finished product.
(Side 2 of tape does not have the preceding part of the interview. The tape now starts here.)
When the girl touches the keys and the image of the letter is printed on a photographic paper. All we do is run that through a processor and it’s just like processing a picture, photograph, it’s processed and it’s ready to be used. We just paste it up and it’s ready for the camera and it’s quite an improvement.
Interviewer: Yes I can see would be a tremendous time saver.
Mr. Wells continues: Saves time and it’s much cleaner. We don’t have the dirt and the heat and the fumes. We don’t have the wait. You can see behind you there, the old page was like this. This is the old page, see it’s the solid lead. Then we changed, this is the way now. We set it up and take a photograph and put it on an aluminum plate and we print from the aluminum plate.
Interviewer: That’s a tremendous difference.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s still a long way from the old handset method. Many other things of course have changed during that same period but this is just an example of some of the changes that have taken place. Of course during my father’s lifetime, the electric motor was invented and you think about...
Interviewer: ...tremendous impact
Mr. Wells continues: The electric motor made all of these things possible including the computer.
Interviewer: ….now think of the changes in your father’s generation…
Mr. Wells continues: During his lifetime they developed the streetcar and it went out of business.
Interviewer: We may see them come back, with the gasoline shortage….
Mr. Wells continues: in different form….
Interviewer: I had one more question written down: about the locked gates. Did the people have any particular resentment of the fact that things were locked up and that it was so difficult to get in.
Mr. Wells continues: It was just a nuisance, it was just a nuisance. For example, I was invited down to speak to one of the early Oak Ridge organizations which the Oak Ridge Business Men’s Club or some kind of club like that about Anderson County and the history of Anderson County, and back in those days I did not, I didn’t have the time to go down there and go through the process and get me a permanent pass. I couldn’t hardly justify it anyhow so I just didn’t do it. My advertising salesman, who also handled the distribution of our papers, did have a permanent pass but I did not. Whenever went down there, if I was going to see some business, they would arrange for a pass to be left at the gate. Well on this particular occasion, I was invited to this club and so I went down thinking that there’d be a pass for me at the gate but they had failed to remember. So I got to the gate, still plenty of time but, they had left their homes and gone to the meeting place. There I was at the gate and they were meeting. So, of course I called Gus Robinson who was in charge of the Public Relations office down there and told him, Gus, I’m out here at the gate and I ‘m suppose to be in there meeting with such and such club and he says, well, I’ll take care of it. So he called and he made the arrangements. But this was the type of thing that was just a nuisance. It was a nuisance if you had business in there.
Interviewer: Yes I’m sure it was.
Mr. Wells continues: And later on we’d go down there and sometimes if you’d go down there with the traffic, when the people were going to work, they’d just wave them on through, whether you had a pass or not you’d just be waved through. The next time they’d searched you, I mean they’d search your car, search you and everything else. It was not consistent. Judge Seeber’s wife was going down there one time to visit some friends and play cards, and she was stopped and the car was searched and they found one of the Judge’s shotguns lying in the trunk of the car. Well they seized the car and Mrs. Seeber and the shotgun. So she got on the phone and called the judge and I don’t know if she could locate him right, immediately or not, he was the county judge. Finally she got a hold of him and told him. Of course it tickled him…. that they had caught her but anyhow he got the wheels turning and got her freed.
Interviewer: I’ll bet Mrs. Seeber is still mad.
Mr. Wells continues: Well she didn’t know his shotgun was in the back of the car. But that was just interesting…how the thing worked. But it was more of a nuisance than anything else. I don’t think anybody resented it, it just a nuisance. If you wanted to go down there and you had business down there, why you’d just call down there and somebody would say you were coming to visit and they’d leave you a pass at the gate. You may never see them but they would vouch for you and the pass was left at the gate and you’d get in. That was the way most of us handled it. I remember when trying to get in the Atomic Energy office building there, there were times when you’d go down there and you’d have to wait outside. They’d have to send the word in, get the pass and you’d have to wait. Somebody would escort you wherever you were going. After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I went down there and there was no guard, nobody at the gate, I walked in the building, went right to where I wanted to go. Two days later the guards were back and the whole thing just went through that period, just a short period where they didn’t have anybody there. The whole thing was just wide open. Then they clamped it down. You never knew what to expect.
Interviewer: Was there much reaction in the county to the news that the bomb had been dropped when people knew what was actually going on?
Mr. Wells continues: You know it’s hard to remember. Of course the whole county had not much different reaction than the whole country to it. I think there was some relief to the fact that, I think that the fact that the war was ending over shadowed everything else.
Interviewer: There wasn’t any particular local pride in that this had been done at Oak Ridge. It was just more of a stunning surprise?
Mr. Wells continues: I just don’t remember that. It’s hard to say. I don’t remember that. I know we were happy to, we were happy about it and happy to have the information that we had a part in it. I don’t know how the general public reacted, I don’t know…hardly any way to know.
Interviewer: That’s true.
Mr. Wells continues: I just don’t know how they reacted. I think there was some relief and the fact that now we knew what it was and maybe all that we’d gone through was justified, that kind of feeling. I don’t know that there was any more than there was in Oak Ridge itself. Oak Ridge, I think they had a reaction, they were happy to have had a part in it. But ending the war I think over shadowed everything else. Then it’s hard to look back on that, and know exactly what the reaction was.
Interviewer: Well is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?
Mr. Wells continues: No, it’s a, I think we went through. You know communities that are viable and continue, go through various stages. Anderson County, thinking about it the other day, we’ve gone through a number of stages. We had the period when the railroads were being built through here and then the development of the coal mines. Anderson County produces more coal than any other county in Tennessee and always has, either the deep mines or the strip mining or the combination. We had the period when the people came in here to build the railroads. Well some of them stayed and some of the families are still here, although they’re almost all gone. Some of the people that came in with the coal mining business stayed but they are gone, pretty much all gone. Then we had the period when Norris Dam came, of course some of us are still here. I’m one of those. I came when TVA came. Of course we had the period when Oak Ridge came. We have a great many people in town that are connected with Oak Ridge. Now we’ve just had the announcement of 5 new plants that are being built in Eagle Bend. Now we’re fixing to go through another period and these people will have some people that will come in here that will be specialists in their field and, of course, most of the employees will be local people or people will be brought in here. So we’re fixing to go through another period. And each of these different groups, each of these kind of waves of population changes has had an effect on the community. Each of them has left a little of their flavor. So we’re going through another period now when, we’ll be changing with this more industrialized aspect of the community is right here with us, rather than 10 miles down the road. So…..
Transcribed August 2005
Typed by LB

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ORAL HISTORY OF HORACE V. WELLS, JR.
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 10, 1973
Interviewer: Maybe if you would first identify yourself and….
Mr. Wells: I was looking over the list of questions that you wanted there and of course my name is Horace V. Wells, Jr. I still use that because my father is still living and his name is Horace V. Wells also. He is 96 years old, will be this year. Anyhow I was born in Columbia, South Carolina. My family moved to Nashville in 1919 when I was small, and then I went to the schools in Nashville and I eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University. While I was in Vanderbilt I started work for the Tennessean. And I worked for the Tennessean for 5 years, and when I left I was State News Editor of the Tennessean. My wife and I decided we would like to live in a small town and have our own newspaper so we heard of an opportunity here in Clinton. This was at that time that TVA was being authorized and had been authorized by Congress and President Roosevelt had signed the bill. So we came to Clinton and there was a newspaper here, Anderson County News. The newspaper was a handset newspaper, even in 1933 and with the cooperation of a man named Miner Bragg in Murfreesboro who owned the Rutherford Courier, we gathered enough machinery and other necessary materials together and came to Clinton in August of 1933. On August 31st we published our first paper, Clinton Courier. Then a few years later in 1939, why Anderson County News was for sale and I bought it and combined the two newspapers into the Clinton Courier News. It was during that period Norris Dam was built and the town of Norris and the county had shown, the county did not really suffer during that depression period cause everybody was short of money, the whole country, but the banks here did not fail. They did combine but they did not fail. Magnet Mills continued to work at least part time and provided work for the people, that was the large industry here in the county. So things went along pretty well and we were able to make a go of it and then of course in 1942 Oak Ridge came in. That changed the whole complex of the county and our operation and everything else.
I noticed you were interested in my family. My wife died in 1969. She and I graduated together from Vanderbilt and worked on the paper together. We have four daughters. The oldest is Dorothy Ann, who lives in Indianapolis and she is a librarian. She has a Masters in Library Science from Indiana University. She worked at Oak Ridge for a while before with ORAU before she went up there, to Indianapolis. She has three children. And then we have twins, Natalie and Katrina. Natalie lives in Nashville and Katrina lives in Lake City, Florida. Each of them has three children. Then my youngest daughter, Nancy, lives in Elmira, New York and she has one and one on the way. 10 grandchildren and one in prospect. All of them, I’m happy to say, completed their college work before they got married and each of them has training in some specific field. So whatever comes, why, at least I have that assurance that they can take care of themselves. That’s about all you can give them you know.
We came to Clinton in ’33 and of course, at that time there weren’t any houses available just like now, still not any houses available. After I had gone back to Nashville, one of the men I had contacted called me and said his brother was moving to Lake City and his house would be available and so we rented the house sight unseen and then came to Clinton and moved into it. I don’t think my wife ever saw if before we moved into it. We stayed there three years in this house and meanwhile built our own house where we live now. We still live there. The years in Clinton have really sped by. This year we celebrate our 40th anniversary in Clinton. We’ve seen Clinton change a great deal in those years. The population in Clinton when we came was around 1700 and of course today it’s just, in the narrow city limits that we have, it’s around 5,000. When you get outside of Clinton of course you know, depending how far out you go it begins to multiply whether you’d say that the Clinton area has probably 10 or 12 thousand people, not counting Oak Ridge.
The paper has, we started out, interesting to look back, and our first goal was to get 500 subscribers. We offered to take anything for that first 500. We swapped for jams and jellies and eggs and potatoes and most anything that people would bring in. My wife of course, was a Math major at Vanderbilt and had worked in New York for Macy’s as a statistician. She was not trained as a cook. One day I traded in a bushel of grapes. So I took them home and she said what am I going to do with these grapes? And I said well, make jelly, make jelly and she said well that’s a good idea. So I went home that night and she was in tears. She was just bawling. And I said what is the trouble? She said, I’ve been warming these grapes all day. I said what have you been doing? She said, I’ve been peeling the grapes. I said, peeling the grapes? I said well, what is it, why peel the grapes? She said, well here’s the recipe. And I looked at it and the recipe said for fruit jellies first peel the fruit. Of course she learned the hard way. I never did let her forget that.
The circulation began to grow when the first 500 came really rather rapidly. The people seemed real anxious for a newspaper. And over the years it’s grown. We have been thrilled by each of the steps as it’s reached a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand and now we’re right close to seven thousand now. And ours is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and so we are looking forward to the day when we really will have that seven thousand. We get up there and then we drop back. Soon I think that it will hold. We are not making any particular effort because of the newsprint shortage and the fact that you can only charge so much for advertising. It’s just a matter of pride; we’d like to see it get to seven thousand. You know we make the effort to gather the news and put it together and have a product there. The more people that want to buy it, the prouder you can be of your product. So that’s the only reason we’d like to have that.
The county’s gone through several interesting periods. The coming of Norris created problems. TVA brought in people and during that period skilled people were out of jobs all over the country, engineers, architects and so TVA brought in people from everywhere. They came in from Middle West and from the East and these were all, many of them, were well educated people, just due to the depression, were unable to find satisfactory jobs. So they came in and of course in the early days all the people that lived in Norris worked for TVA and for many years, had the Bureau Mines in Norris. Of course these are all technical people. They had laboratories there for a while in which they explored the making of crystals and then the ceramics and each of these brought in people with certain skills. And then of course TVA began to get out of that area and out of the, the laboratory in Norris then was changed to one that would provide TVA with information about its various projects, the dams and the steam plants and the effect of these on the river traffic and the channels and so forth. And so at the laboratory in Norris now, they, most of the people there are skilled and they studied water flows and the pressures of water. When they developed then, built Melton Hill, they developed a new method of emptying the locks and refilling the locks much more rapidly without, with less, turbulence than had been the case on many others. But anyhow, over the years Norris has ceased to become just a TVA town. And people from the county live there, moved in there and also a great many of the people I think, probably near 50%, nearly 50% of the people work in Oak Ridge and drive from Norris to Oak Ridge. It’s a beautiful neighborhood community, bedroom community, and many of them drive to Knoxville, now that they have the interstate why they can be in Knoxville in 20-25 minutes, which is closer than some areas right in Knoxville as far as time is concerned.
Back in the early days, Anderson County was a pretty strong Republican county and of course the people that came into Norris were liberals and, back in those days the only place a liberal had to go was to the Democratic Party so the Republicans didn’t want them to vote. And so they contended they lived on a government reservation therefore they weren’t entitled to vote. And so a bunch of us got together here in Clinton and took the case to the Supreme Court. Just in a matter of days, Judge Barnett ruled that the people were entitled to vote. So that opened the door for Norris and Norris has continued to vote pretty strongly Democratic all down through the years. Then when Oak Ridge came in we had the same problem. They had a little problem voting back in the early days but they soon worked it. There was a difference in Oak Ridge and Norris though. The people in the early days in Oak Ridge lived in apartments. They were temporary residents and the question was were they really, was Oak Ridge really their home, because in many instances people say, well, they were just there for their work and this was not their home. This was during the construction days before people had settled down. And probably the matter of real fact, Oak Ridge was not their home. And of course under the election laws, you’re supposed to vote at your home, where your home is, even though you may be living somewhere else, you’re supposed to still go home. This has caused a little problem but finally they, it has worked out and settled down.
Oak Ridge had a great influence on the county and the influence has been largely for the good. As a result Anderson County has many firsts in its government. It’s one of the first counties in Tennessee to adopt the central purchasing and central accounting system. It’s one of the few counties in Tennessee that has outside auditors, not state auditors, but auditors hired by the county to come in and check the books. It was the first county in Tennessee to take advantage of a new state law in establishing a conservation commission. It was one of the first counties, not the first county, but one of the first, to have its sanitary landfill approved. One of the first counties to establish a roadside pickup of garbage to eliminate these roadside dumps. One of the first counties to get involved as a county in the operation of an ambulance service. One of the first counties to begin to change over to the use of computers for the handling of its tax rolls. (tape break) The registers office also, the Register of Deeds Office, also has some of the most modern equipment of any similar office in this state and eventually will probably go to placing the records on microfilm, they’re not on microfilm yet, but looking toward the day when it can go to microfilm. These are just some examples of the influence of the forward and progressive people who serve on county court from Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge does not have control of the county court because the numbers of squires in the county exceeds the number of squires in Oak Ridge by one, but many of the squires in Oak Ridge work in Oak Ridge so you have that Oak Ridge influence. As I say, it’s been a good influence. Anderson County has some real good efficient office workers because of the fact that Oak Ridge votes for quality and candidates, not necessarily party. We have a mixture: the county Judge is Republican, the sheriff is a Democrat, the county attorney is a Democrat and the Trustee is a Republican. Your county court clerk and your circuit court clerk, school superintendent and --????-- are all democrats. So you see that not party line necessarily, although each party does try to field a ticket and put in candidates, but the voters when it comes down to the voters, they usually select, they have selected men of quality. So the influence of Oak Ridge has been real good.
Now you asked something about the take over, the taking over or the acquiring of the land in Oak Ridge. This was a rather difficult period for the county. The U.S. Army sent in people who were in government service to handle the acquisition of the property for the then called Clinton Engineering Works, Clinton Demolition Range, they called it at one time. They had different names for it then. It’s kind of a misleading type of name too, so people would have no idea what it was. They sent in people here, many of the men came from the Midwest where farmland, rich, rolling land, they came in here and saw these hills in East Tennessee and they said it’s not worth anything. Well here were people who had land that had been in their family from the original grant, from the state of North Carolina, for service in the Revolutionary War. The land had never been sold and it was the only home they had. They been making a living there, they were satisfied. They came in and offered prices that they felt were too low. And in fact they were too low for them to go and buy comparable land anywhere else. Some of the people that were moved, this was the third time they were moved by the government. They originally lived in the area that is now the Smoky Mountain National Park. The government bought, or the state or the government didn’t buy it, but the state bought the land and they were moved out and they moved into the Norris Dam, Anderson, Union, Campbell County area where Norris Lake is located. Then the TVA came along and bought the land and they, TVA, did pay fair prices for the land and they moved out and said, we’ll just find us a place where nobody can find us. So they moved down here in the lower end of the Clinch River, down where K-25 and X-10 are located, there’s nobody can find us down here, but then they did. Because the very fact that they were living in an area that was more or less remote and protected by hills and on the river, was one of the reasons they selected this site, so they had to move again. At the time that they were having to move, gasoline rationing, tire rationing went into effect, and it was difficult for them to get gasoline, difficult for them to get tires. I was chairman of the Ration Board at that time and so it was part of my job, along with the others on the Board, to do something about it. So, we got in touch with the people in Nashville and they got in touch with people in Washington, and said we never heard of Clinton Engineering Works. We never heard of it. We never heard of the Manhattan District, don’t know anything about it, we have no provisions for it at all. So we had to come back and so we told them, well these people up there, their lands taken away from them, they’ve got to move in limited time and we’ve got to have tires and gasoline. And I said, now we’re going to see that they’re moved. They said, alright you go ahead and make up your own rule, just so you treat everybody alike, and just don’t tell us about it. I said we’ll try to take care of it. You let us know about the tires and of course most of them are recapped tires, this was during the period before the country had developed a synthetic rubber and this was in that early period. Tires were real scarce. So we came back and they did, whenever they had any excess tires left from any other county in the state, they would give them to us. General Lytle Brown was in charge of the War Price and Ration Board at that time in Nashville for the state. I visited his home in Nashville when I was in school and I knew his sons. He understood our problem and he cooperated with us and we got everybody moved out. We got them gasoline to go out and look for another place, and we got them tires and so that finally when they did find a place they could move out. Well of course the record will show, if you look into that, that many of these people went into Federal Court. Congress sent a committee down to investigate it. They did receive considerably more for their land on appeal, than may have been offered by the government. This was a real upsetting situation for awhile there. And as much more upsetting due to the fact that they didn’t know what was going to happen. All the rumors about what they were going to do down there and none of it was in connection with the war efforts, you know. Some kind of boondoggle thing you know. They didn’t feel that they were making a contribution to the war effort because they didn’t know what it was. This made it more difficult to come in and take their homes. In one instance of a black family, an elderly lady lived there, she had a very small home, she had a good well. The house was of no real value and they didn’t offer her anything particularly for it. Well where could she go and find a piece of land with a spring and have a house on it? This was the problem they faced. When you are trying to put dollar and cent value on it, against what it was worth to her. It was our feeling that people that are uprooted in this fashion, should be relocated in a similar situation somewhere, no matter what it cost. And we felt that you could not put it on a dollar and cents basis. There’d be a comparability basis. But this was a real problem and a real hardship for a lot of people.
Interviewer: I would think particularly the people who had been moved more than once.
Mr. Wells continues: Well, she had never been moved, this was not true in her case, but it was in many of the others. But anyhow that was the period through there.
Interviewer: I’d like to know what some of the rumors were, you mentioned the rumors as to what was being done here.
Mr. Wells continues: Most of them were rumors of you know, they didn’t have any idea what. They thought it was some political thing that Roosevelt was behind. They talked about, well they didn’t have any idea. Nobody had any idea what was being done. Most of the rumors were pretty absurd type of things because they didn’t have any idea. Of course when you’re talking about demolition range we knew what that was and that was what they were afraid of, you know for awhile that this was to be some kind of target practicing range down there. The first location, was there was a demolition located the headquarters located in Kingston. Well they never did kind of get over that, until later they did change the name to Clinton Engineer Works and then dropped that demolition name. You can imagine what the situation was when they thought about that. But people really didn’t have any idea; it was a well-kept secret as far as the local people concerned. It might not be well kept as far as the Russians were concerned or the Germans, but locally it was a well-kept secret. Of course we saw, here in Clinton, the Southern Railroad had a depot here, it was the nearest depot to Oak Ridge until they finally worked out an arrangement where the L&N and Southern, both went into Oak Ridge over the same track. They began to unload these huge vacuum tubes that was six feet tall, you know, and things like that. Of course people here had no idea what they could be used for, but these were fantastic type of things. They’d never seen a tube larger than one used in the radio you know. See these big tubes that are six feet high being unloaded up there.
Interviewer: That cause quite a bit of consternation I’d think.
Mr. Wells continues: It cause a great deal of concern. The yard would just be full of them up there, until they could come and haul them off. We had a tremendous influx of people during the early days. It was estimated that we probably had more than 80,000 people in the area at one time. The people were living in barns and chicken houses. Of course automobile business firms went out of business, so the garages, some of the garages, were converted into kind of dormitory arrangements. They were really not much more than dove coops, like places for doves, you know, little cubicles all through there and people just placed anywhere, and the men were just here four or five days a week and then they’d go home on the weekend you know, except when they’d work overtime. It created a lot of other problems, it’s interesting to look back and see some of the problems that resulted from it. A lot of the men were away from their families, so the first thing you know you, the court was deluged with divorce cases. Every court the docket was filled, back then we only had the circuit court and chancery court and the criminal court. Well the criminal court didn’t handle divorces, circuit court only met once every four months, and the chancery court only met once every six months. Well you can see what happened. The dockets in circuit and chancery court were just literally loaded down with divorce cases. So that’s when they created the trial justice court and gave it concurrent jurisdiction in divorce and domestic matters with the chancery court and then they were able to get over the, bring down the backlog of divorce cases. But that’s how we got the, we were one of the first counties in the state to have that type of court, which later became the sessions court. This was the, it was called the trial justice court because of the fact it was given concurrent jurisdiction in divorce cases and domestic matters. And that was the result of the heavy influx into the county.
Of course Oak Ridge had a big influence on the elections in the early days. One of the big fights that we had around here was over legalization of the sale of alcoholic beverages, liquor. We’d already been through a number of them in the county before Oak Ridge came and they’d always been overwhelmingly defeated. Back then it was just beer. And so when Oak Ridge came, why some of the people that saw an opportunity to make money, they were the ones that requested and the ones that were putting up the money to fight the battle. So they came in and they stole the election, stuffed the ballot boxes and carried it for legalization of alcoholic beverages, the sale of whiskey. Of course Oak Ridge...
Interviewer: What year was this?
Mr. Wells continues: I don’t remember the year.
Interviewer: This was before Oak RIdge?
Mr. Wells continues: No this was in Oak Ridge, it was during the high day of Oak Ridge, before Oak Ridge was incorporated and Oak Ridge couldn’t have a whiskey store because it wasn’t incorporated. So the whiskey stores were in Clinton and Lake City and ...
Interviewer: Which was not what the people wanted.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s what we didn’t want. We didn’t want. But anyhow, they operated for, I think, a couple of years. Meanwhile the election fraud was so bad, that even the early League of Women Voters in Oak Ridge and the people in the county said, we just can’t have this type of election so they went and got voting machines. We were one of the first rural counties in Tennessee to have voting machines. So the county court voted to buy voting machines and Judge Yarnell went out to San Francisco, I mean Los Angeles, and bought some second hand voting machines. They had gotten beyond the capacity of the voting machines they were using. So he bought these voting machines and brought them back here, brought a truckload of voting machines back. So we switched to voting machines and we’ve been on voting machines ever since. So the next election with the voting machines, they voted liquor out. Which goes to prove that it actually was a fraud.
Interviewer: It was fraud.
Mr. Wells continues: In fact there are many other evidences of the fraud and that is, the pull books from the remote precincts were just filled with name of people that, like the publisher of the Oak Ridger and some of these other names, they just wrote in names over there. It was just an out and out steal. The interesting thing, the county judge took the case, we fought the thing all the way through it, we took it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court threw it out on the grounds that the county judge was not the proper person to bring the suit into court and he was charged with the costs, personally. To me that was one of the side lights of the early conflicts. Before the trial justice court, one of the things that brought it about was the Justice of the Peace courts that we had operating. Oak Ridge had two Justices of the Peace down there. You can imagine with all the problems that came with floating population and with the people living here temporarily and making so much money, they didn’t know what to do with it, that you had a lot of problems: gambling, whiskey and fights and shooting and just everything you can think of. So the courts, the Justice of the Peace courts were really flourishing. They were the ones that issued the warrants and had the preliminary hearings and collected the fees. So the thing got so bad in Oak Ridge that it just got completely out of hand and one of the Justices of the Peace down there was convicted and sent to jail for fraud. Absconding with the thieves and he was not keeping his record and so forth so he was sent to jail. And that also helped bring about, the people, it’s interesting that people won’t agree to a change in the way things are done, until something gets so bad that they can’t stand it.
Interviewer: I think that’s true.
Mr. Wells continues: Then they’ll change. That’s what happened in this instance. And that made it easy to get the, to take away all authority from the Justice of the Peace as far as hearing cases and trying cases was concerned. Well, of course, he wasn’t the only one, he’s just the only one that got caught. We had some up here in Clinton that were just as bad, but he was the one that got caught. And so the sheriffs were ousted and some of them just resigned when they, it was a period when, with such an influx of population and with these people being committed to vote, that people got into offices shouldn’t be there. And we had slot machines, we had illegal whiskey, we had gambling all over the place. Whenever you have that, whenever you see signs of slot machines in a county where it’s against the law, you know that somebody has control of your law enforcement agency. It couldn’t exist otherwise. When they control them in one area, they control them in all. They can’t just control them a little bit; they control them all the way. This is what happened back then. It was a pretty lawless period there for a while.
Interviewer: It must have been rather parallel to an army camp for a while.
Mr. Wells continues: It was similar to that, that’s right.
Interviewer: Cause they were not families who came in.
Mr. Wells continues: We had the same thing earlier when Norris Dam was being built. We had all these people in here working on Norris Dam, and we had a sheriff that divided his force up into, had one man that handled the whiskey, one man handled the gambling, one man handled the girls and he turned it over to them. They had all these roadhouses scattered all through the county and it was a wild and wooly period. The last time he ran, he ran, he was re-elected; you know the sheriff can only serve three consecutive terms. The last time he ran, this time for Uncle Bob, Bob Smith, this time for Uncle Bob, and he was elected.
Interviewer: Well did the situation then begin to change when Oak Ridge became more stabilized?
Mr. Wells continues: Oh yes. That’s right. As soon as the families, as soon as you have the influence of your families and people began to pay taxes you know…bring, having their families here and getting to pay taxes has a real sobering effect on the community.
Interviewer: Of course Oak Ridge didn’t pay taxes until after….
Mr. Wells continues: No that’s right, but they had their families here. I think that is the biggest sobering influence that we had. We just had all these dormitories filled with men and others filled with women that were guests here, really, they would say, if I die send me back home, send me home; which would indicate very clearly this was not home.
Interviewer: That must present a very unstable situation.
Mr. Wells continues: So this was the situation. Well now on the, you asked one question there about acquisition of the land. The difference in the acquisition by TVA and by the, I think it was the treasury people that came in and acquired it for the Army, the attitude was entirely different. In the first place TVA came in and they used local people. They did everything they could to be sure that the people were paid a fair price for the land. They did everything they could to be sure, and I never did hear any real serious complaint about TVA not paying fair price for the land. And in the second they used local people who understood the value of the land and the people. And the third thing they did, they saw that the people were relocated; they helped the people relocate. They brought in all the various government agencies to help relocate. When they took over Oak Ridge then they did not do much about relocating. It was a hurry up job that pushed into it and it was not as well organized, now they did provide some help, the University did try to help. I remember the Sunday before the area was to be closed off, a group from the University came out, came by my house one Sunday afternoon and said come on let’s go down and ride through the Oak Ridge area. Last time we’ll have a chance. I said that’s fine, I’d like to do that. So we went down and rode all through there and they told me then, that they had been asked to help in doing some of the relocating. But it was such a rush job that it couldn’t be done properly. But in Norris it was not that rushed. You see they started building the dam in ’33 and the dam was not completed until ’36, so they had three years for the people really to get out, except in certain specific spots where the actual dam construction was. Nobody lived there anyhow, right there, they lived near there but not there. Some of the areas where the timber had to be cut out where it would interfere. Now you take right near Norris Dam the water there is several hundred feet deep. Well they just cut off, they didn’t have to cut any of that out, right in there except where they’re working, but as you got further back, some of them they just cut off the tops of the trees and other places they had to clean it all out. It just depended on, well above a certain level, above a certain amount of sea level they had to clean it out.
Interviewer: And there was no acute urgency as there was in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Wells continues: The urgency was not there. It was being handled more or less on a local basis, by local people.
Interviewer: That would make a great difference in the attitude.
Mr. Wells continues: It did make a great difference and it made a difference in attitude. The people who were acquiring the land, it made a difference in the attitude who were being uprooted. They’d go in and sit down with them and tell them what was happening. Another thing that was interesting in that period was that of course, that was a period when nobody had any money. You could go out and buy land somewhere else. There had not been this tremendous increase in the value of land that came along later. Of course now its even worse, but in the 1940-‘42 in that period the price of land had gone up. TVA had built several dams. They’d built Douglas Dam and some of these others and moved people out of all these valleys. Well you were narrowing down the available land that people could go and buy. So the price had gone up. There were a lot of factors combined to make it a real difficult period for some of the people that moved out and some of them are real bitter.
Interviewer: Do you think that resentment still persist today among some people?
Mr. Wells continues: I don’t know whether it does or not, but that’s too far back now, most of the older people are dead and gone. The young ones have gotten settled and doing other things.
You were discussing the school situation. As far as Anderson County was concerned back then, they had two schools down there. They had Robertsville, which for a while operated as a high school and then they had Scarboro which was a brand new school, it had just been opened. And Scarboro now is run by the University and the Atomic Energy Commission have a joint operation there studying animals and so forth and the effect of...
Interviewer: You’re referring to the UT Ag Farm?
Mr. Wells continues: Yeah. That was Scarboro School. It was fairly new so they bought the school, bought both of them from the county.
Interviewer: Now where was Robertsville?
Mr. Wells continues: It’s where it is now, where the old Robertsville School is now. They left it and began to add on to and spread out there and...
Interviewer: Well now there is a school which is now called Robertsville Junior High School which was built about 1953, I believe maybe the old Robertsville was on that site before.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s right. Right there, that’s the same place. Then there was another school down in Roane County, I’ve been trying to think of the name of, and for some reason it just completely escapes my memory, down where K-25 is.
Interviewer: There was a community called Wheat in that area.
Mr. Wells continues: Wheat that’s right, now that’s in Roane county and...
Interviewer: ...and there was a school at Wheat.
Mr. Wells continues: There was a school at Wheat. There was kind of an academy there back years. You see, in this area and I guess outside of the cities, until oh the early 1900’s there were no high schools provided by the state or the county.
Interviewer: I didn’t know that.
Mr. Wells continues: They had these academies, these private schools. They provided the elementary schools and then they didn’t provide the high schools. Then the high schools came into being in the early 1900’s somewhere in there, but before that they had these academies: Anderson Academy, Coal Creek Academy, Wheat Academy, the old Clinton Academy. People would pay tuition and send their children to these academies. There were only a few of the children, most of them just finished with the elementary grades. However, you look back, and my father did not go beyond that elementary grade level but he studied Latin and Greek.
Interviewer: In the elementary level?
Mr. Wells continues: In the elementary level. And wherever he finished off. He still remembers some of his Greek and some of his Latin even now...
Interviewer: That’s remarkable.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s remarkable. But they were concerned with educating, those that got education were proud of it and they went to school to learn and not just to pass the time. My mother and her father operated and owned one of these academies. His academy, over in North Carolina, was for girls. And of course she went there and her sister went there and spelling and writing were two of the things they pushed for girls, particularly among other social graces. But she takes great pride in, and all her life has taken pride in her ability to spell. Today we’ve gotten into that period where school teachers grew up in the period, when they taught phonetics and didn’t teach spelling, and our school teachers have grown up to the point where they can’t spell and have no pride and they brush it off that they can’t spell and they don’t encourage their pupils to learn to spell. We’ve gotten into the age where people really don’t care that they can’t spell and to me it’s a real distressing thing. I deal with schoolteachers and others and it’s just a shame that, my own daughter some of them are in that same fix, and yet they are all college graduates but they can’t spell.
Interviewer: My husband has commented on this as a scientist.
Mr. Wells continues: It’s distressing but of course that’s aside from our topic.
Interviewer: I would like to know a little more about the schools. Did they continue to use Scarboro School and Robertsville School for the children who came into Oak Ridge?
Mr. Wells continues: Not Scarboro, they did not use Scarboro for a school because there were no dwellings in that area. I think they did use Robertsville for a while but it was inadequate. They had to build other schools. It was a small school, relatively small. It was probably just a small high school. I don’t know how many rooms it had but not more than, I don’t remember how many. I’ve been there, I was down there….I was down there before Oak Ridge came but I don’t remember how many rooms it had.
Interviewer: Did the people who came in throw much of a burden on the county school system or were there that many living outside the area who went to the Clinton system.
Mr. Wells continues: There had been a burden on county schools. The first burden hit us down around Oliver Springs and that’s when Norwood School was built. We did get some federal money to help build Norwood school, and that’s the only help that we had from the federal government except the 874 money.
Interviewer: That’s the impacted area….
Mr. Wells continues: That’s the impacted area money which it goes for operation but not for building.
Interviewer: Well that doesn’t seem quite right.
Mr. Wells continues: No, it didn’t and which we argue with the AEC about now. They had a study made not long ago that they’d several, I think at $80,000 the University of Tennessee made this study and they came up with the same thing. They said it wasn’t right either and the county has had to build all these schools, add on to them to take care of the children of the people who had come in. But the only federal money that I remember was for Norwood Elementary School and for the rest of them we’ve had to go ahead and the county’s had to build them.
Interviewer: Well did this throw much of a burden on the other facilities, things like the stores and the…
Mr. Wells continues: During the war period there was a tremendous burden. We had, of course, things were rationed, sugar was rationed, coffee was rationed, shoes were rationed. And when they started rationing things why of course, the reason they had to ration was because they were in short supply. Bacon was difficult to buy, about the only time you got bacon was if you were a long time customer of the store, they might save it for you. I have seen lines of people standing waiting to buy bread. Bread was short and I’ve seen longer lines of people waiting to buy cigarettes and women’s hose. Miller’s used to get a shipment every now and then of women’s hose and word would get out and I’ve seen the line all the way around that store, way back up the block waiting for the store to open to buy hose. Because you see, when we got in war with Japan, eliminated the silk and then they had to develop the synthetic fibers and there was lag there, between the time they developed, and they had to change over the machines to use the synthetic fibers. The machines had been using silk. So there’s a lag in that period and so there was a tremendous shortage of hosiery. And this gave Magnet Mills a chance to use up all that surplus stock of hose they’d built up back during the Depression days.
Interviewer: It’s and ill wind…
Mr. Wells: They’d continue to operate and they built up a huge surplus of what they called grey stock and then the war came along and there they had it and so they were able to sell it then. They cleaned it out.
Interviewer: It helped them out.
Mr. Wells continues: And they helped the whole community because the people were busy there. Then of course, the people were going to Oak Ridge to work and they were short of labor to finish it and to process it. So it’s interesting how one thing has an impact on the other and helps one and hurts another. But the impact on the stores was not so great except the fact that we had the shortages and more people we had in here, we all lived through it you know, it wasn’t all that bad. Coffee was short, I didn’t drink coffee anyhow so it didn’t matter to me in particular. Sugar was short, we didn’t do a lot of canning, so that didn’t affect us a whole lot. We were able to get by on the shoes without too much difficulty. We did miss the bacon a few times but we got by. It’s interesting that people now have gotten so spoiled that you talk about gasoline rationing, we will probably have by next spring. We had it back then, I know that I had to ride the train to Nashville down there on ration board business. I couldn’t get gasoline to go down there on ration board business. I rode the train down there and...
Interviewer: And that was an overnight trip?
Mr. Wells continues: Yeah, it took me all night to get down there and stayed down there and came back the next night and it was rough. I remember we went to Nashville on the bus going to Press Association meetings. We’d go down there on the bus and it was an all day trip down there just about, the bus stopping all along the way.
Interviewer: It still is, almost.
[SIDE 2]
Mr. Wells continues: But you know you live through those although you wonder, I remember at times we’d think well how much longer, just like a nightmare, how much longer will it continue. How much longer? Of course, as far as business was concerned, our operation, it was real difficult to get help and we were really strained. Of course at the same time it was difficult to get help it was difficult to get paper and course merchant, didn’t have to advertise, what could they advertise, they couldn’t get things to sell. Car advertising was all out and it was a real struggle for awhile there. But we made it, everybody made it. Do you have any other thing that you were particularly interested in?
Interviewer: I’ve got some questions here but I haven’t, I think we’ve covered most of what I’ve mentioned in the letter.
Mr. Wells continues: I want to say, an aside, that in the 40 years, when I came to Anderson County 40 years ago the type for the newspaper was set by hand, I brought the first live type and then later on bought a teletype operator, tape operation, that and a new line of type that could operate with this tape which meant that I, we would perforate the tape from the keyboard and then the tape would operate the machine which speeded up the operation a great deal and then the first of this year we did away with the lining all together and now we’re using these computer type operation to set the type. So we’ve gone all the way from hand set to the computer period in those 40 years. And for the line type we speeded it up where we could set 8 to 10 lines a minute. The computer type operations, and it’s not the fastest one available, will set 30 lines a minute.
Interviewer: That’s quite a …
Mr. Wells continues: Of course you can get one that’s set 150 to 200 lines a minute but we don’t need that much production. So we’re satisfied with the 30 lines and this operation we go from the keyboard to the finished product. We don’t have any intermediate steps, keyboard to the finished product.
(Side 2 of tape does not have the preceding part of the interview. The tape now starts here.)
When the girl touches the keys and the image of the letter is printed on a photographic paper. All we do is run that through a processor and it’s just like processing a picture, photograph, it’s processed and it’s ready to be used. We just paste it up and it’s ready for the camera and it’s quite an improvement.
Interviewer: Yes I can see would be a tremendous time saver.
Mr. Wells continues: Saves time and it’s much cleaner. We don’t have the dirt and the heat and the fumes. We don’t have the wait. You can see behind you there, the old page was like this. This is the old page, see it’s the solid lead. Then we changed, this is the way now. We set it up and take a photograph and put it on an aluminum plate and we print from the aluminum plate.
Interviewer: That’s a tremendous difference.
Mr. Wells continues: That’s still a long way from the old handset method. Many other things of course have changed during that same period but this is just an example of some of the changes that have taken place. Of course during my father’s lifetime, the electric motor was invented and you think about...
Interviewer: ...tremendous impact
Mr. Wells continues: The electric motor made all of these things possible including the computer.
Interviewer: ….now think of the changes in your father’s generation…
Mr. Wells continues: During his lifetime they developed the streetcar and it went out of business.
Interviewer: We may see them come back, with the gasoline shortage….
Mr. Wells continues: in different form….
Interviewer: I had one more question written down: about the locked gates. Did the people have any particular resentment of the fact that things were locked up and that it was so difficult to get in.
Mr. Wells continues: It was just a nuisance, it was just a nuisance. For example, I was invited down to speak to one of the early Oak Ridge organizations which the Oak Ridge Business Men’s Club or some kind of club like that about Anderson County and the history of Anderson County, and back in those days I did not, I didn’t have the time to go down there and go through the process and get me a permanent pass. I couldn’t hardly justify it anyhow so I just didn’t do it. My advertising salesman, who also handled the distribution of our papers, did have a permanent pass but I did not. Whenever went down there, if I was going to see some business, they would arrange for a pass to be left at the gate. Well on this particular occasion, I was invited to this club and so I went down thinking that there’d be a pass for me at the gate but they had failed to remember. So I got to the gate, still plenty of time but, they had left their homes and gone to the meeting place. There I was at the gate and they were meeting. So, of course I called Gus Robinson who was in charge of the Public Relations office down there and told him, Gus, I’m out here at the gate and I ‘m suppose to be in there meeting with such and such club and he says, well, I’ll take care of it. So he called and he made the arrangements. But this was the type of thing that was just a nuisance. It was a nuisance if you had business in there.
Interviewer: Yes I’m sure it was.
Mr. Wells continues: And later on we’d go down there and sometimes if you’d go down there with the traffic, when the people were going to work, they’d just wave them on through, whether you had a pass or not you’d just be waved through. The next time they’d searched you, I mean they’d search your car, search you and everything else. It was not consistent. Judge Seeber’s wife was going down there one time to visit some friends and play cards, and she was stopped and the car was searched and they found one of the Judge’s shotguns lying in the trunk of the car. Well they seized the car and Mrs. Seeber and the shotgun. So she got on the phone and called the judge and I don’t know if she could locate him right, immediately or not, he was the county judge. Finally she got a hold of him and told him. Of course it tickled him…. that they had caught her but anyhow he got the wheels turning and got her freed.
Interviewer: I’ll bet Mrs. Seeber is still mad.
Mr. Wells continues: Well she didn’t know his shotgun was in the back of the car. But that was just interesting…how the thing worked. But it was more of a nuisance than anything else. I don’t think anybody resented it, it just a nuisance. If you wanted to go down there and you had business down there, why you’d just call down there and somebody would say you were coming to visit and they’d leave you a pass at the gate. You may never see them but they would vouch for you and the pass was left at the gate and you’d get in. That was the way most of us handled it. I remember when trying to get in the Atomic Energy office building there, there were times when you’d go down there and you’d have to wait outside. They’d have to send the word in, get the pass and you’d have to wait. Somebody would escort you wherever you were going. After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I went down there and there was no guard, nobody at the gate, I walked in the building, went right to where I wanted to go. Two days later the guards were back and the whole thing just went through that period, just a short period where they didn’t have anybody there. The whole thing was just wide open. Then they clamped it down. You never knew what to expect.
Interviewer: Was there much reaction in the county to the news that the bomb had been dropped when people knew what was actually going on?
Mr. Wells continues: You know it’s hard to remember. Of course the whole county had not much different reaction than the whole country to it. I think there was some relief to the fact that, I think that the fact that the war was ending over shadowed everything else.
Interviewer: There wasn’t any particular local pride in that this had been done at Oak Ridge. It was just more of a stunning surprise?
Mr. Wells continues: I just don’t remember that. It’s hard to say. I don’t remember that. I know we were happy to, we were happy about it and happy to have the information that we had a part in it. I don’t know how the general public reacted, I don’t know…hardly any way to know.
Interviewer: That’s true.
Mr. Wells continues: I just don’t know how they reacted. I think there was some relief and the fact that now we knew what it was and maybe all that we’d gone through was justified, that kind of feeling. I don’t know that there was any more than there was in Oak Ridge itself. Oak Ridge, I think they had a reaction, they were happy to have had a part in it. But ending the war I think over shadowed everything else. Then it’s hard to look back on that, and know exactly what the reaction was.
Interviewer: Well is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?
Mr. Wells continues: No, it’s a, I think we went through. You know communities that are viable and continue, go through various stages. Anderson County, thinking about it the other day, we’ve gone through a number of stages. We had the period when the railroads were being built through here and then the development of the coal mines. Anderson County produces more coal than any other county in Tennessee and always has, either the deep mines or the strip mining or the combination. We had the period when the people came in here to build the railroads. Well some of them stayed and some of the families are still here, although they’re almost all gone. Some of the people that came in with the coal mining business stayed but they are gone, pretty much all gone. Then we had the period when Norris Dam came, of course some of us are still here. I’m one of those. I came when TVA came. Of course we had the period when Oak Ridge came. We have a great many people in town that are connected with Oak Ridge. Now we’ve just had the announcement of 5 new plants that are being built in Eagle Bend. Now we’re fixing to go through another period and these people will have some people that will come in here that will be specialists in their field and, of course, most of the employees will be local people or people will be brought in here. So we’re fixing to go through another period. And each of these different groups, each of these kind of waves of population changes has had an effect on the community. Each of them has left a little of their flavor. So we’re going through another period now when, we’ll be changing with this more industrialized aspect of the community is right here with us, rather than 10 miles down the road. So…..
Transcribed August 2005
Typed by LB